Universität Bielefeld - Technische Fakultät

Workshop 8

Information Processing for Intelligent Service Robots

Organisation:
Tim Lüth (Universität Karlsruhe), Erwin Prassler (FAW Ulm)

Description of the workshop:

For a long time the profitable application of robot systems seemed to be almost exclusively limited to the automation of production processes. Since a few years, however, we can observe a dramatic change regarding the commercial applications of robot systems. Meanwhile numerous fields of applications have been identified, where robots should take dull, dirty, and dangerous tasks in order to save human resources and improve existing working conditions. Along with that, a new field was born "Service Robotics". A recent study predicts a market potential for service robots, which within the next ten years in Germany ranges from 17 to 45 billion DM.

The control and operating systems of those service robots will have to provide skills which go far beyond the performance of existing systems. The design of those intelligent control and operating systems will be one of the major challenges for the field of computer science and artificial intelligence within the next years. In this workshop we want to provide a forum to present and discuss ideas on the design of the "brain" of service robots. The contributions should concentrate on the computational and information processing aspects of building intelligent control systems for service robots.
The workshop topics include but are not limited to

design of robust and intelligent sensor/actor units
environment representation (unstructured, dynamic)
control architectures for interaction and cooperation
real-time planning of complex missions and services
human-robot interface.

In addition to the workshop we will organize, together with representatives of the German AI Institutes AKI, a forum "Service-Roboter: Technische Machbarkeit, Zukunftsmarkt, Utopie" In this forum, a number of prominent representatives of robotics and automation research and industry will discuss the state of the art of the field of service robotics and its future development in terms of technical feasibility and market potential.

Contributions planned:

J. Müllerschön (FhG-IPA): Methods for Automatic Generation of Control Programs for Mobile Service Robots
U. Hanebeck (TU München): Absolute Localization of Fast Mobile Robots based on Angle Measurements
G. Lawitzky, W. Feiten (GMD): Autonomous Low-Cost In-Door Mobility, Siemens J. Huser, H. Surmann, L. Peters: A Fuzzy System for Real-Time Navigation of Mobile Robots
R. Dillmann, M. Kaiser, V.Klingspor, K. Morik, F. Wallner (U Karlsruhe, U. Dortmund): Teaching and Understanding Intelligent Service Robots: A Machine Learning Approach
C. Schlegel (FAW): AMOS - Modular Approach to Integrate Symbolic and Subsymbolic Mechanisms for Mobile Systems

Contact address:

E. Prassler
FAW Ulm
Helmholtzstr. 16
89010 Ulm
Tel. (0731) 501-621
Email: prassler@faw.uni-ulm.de

Ipke Wachsmuth, 1995-01-31

Anke Bodzin, 1995-07-13